STAYING LIVE

BY SHELTON HULL

There is very little one can say about comedian and actor Tracy Morgan that hasn’t been said before, usually by him, usually in a loud voice with inflections that imply that Morgan even shocks himself at times. He’s set to play five shows over the course of three days at the Orlando Improv this week and tickets are already sold out, but don’t let that stop you from trying!

Born in 1968, Morgan grew up in the notorious Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. His early years weren’t easy, being raised in relative poverty by a single mom and an absentee father. He dropped out of high school to sell drugs, but soon discovered that he had a gift for comedy, one that allowed him to transcend his circumstances and achieve global fame, albeit not without a few slip-ups along the way.

After debuting as a side character on the sitcom Martin, Morgan made his initial splash in the industry during his run on Saturday Night Live from 1996 to 2003, where his natural charisma and amiably chaotic style marked him as a star from almost the very start. He was probably best known for playing the outrageous Brian Fellow. Morgan managed to stand out in an era when the cast was stacked with future legends. In fact, Morgan actually got the gig after beating out no less than Stephen Colbert in the final round of auditions.

He was there until 2003, and then he starred in his own, selftitled show, which ran on NBC for one season in 2003-04, as well as making guest spots in a dizzying array of movies and TV shows ranging from Half Baked to Squidbillies, from Crank Yankers to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Then there’s his role on 30 Rock, which aired from 2006 to 2013. More than anything else, it was his work as Tracy Jordan, the character lovingly crafted for him by fellow SNL alum Tina Fey, that will live forever in the form of countless clips and memes. If his career had ended at that point, he would have gone down in history as a comedy legend. And that was nearly the case.

All the jokes stopped, almost forever, on June 7, 2014, after Morgan’s Sprinter bus crashed on the New Jersey Turnpike. One passenger was killed and five others suffered critical injuries, most notably Morgan. The crash wasn’t his fault, but he paid a heavy price, breaking his nose, his leg and his ribs, along with a traumatic brain injury.

After the crash, Morgan was not seen on camera for nearly a year. It took Morgan a very long time to even feel comfortable in public, let alone on stage, but he showed great courage in taking fans through this process with him. His most recent TV role was playing Tray Barker on his criminally underrated show The Last OG, which aired for four seasons from 2018 to 2021.

Today, those dark moments from nearly a decade ago are set back firmly in the rearview mirror, and Morgan is back in peak form. That’s good news for friends and fans alike, many of whom have already bought their tickets for Orlando. Do you have yours?

BY SETH KUBERSKY

An openly bisexual, sword-wielding woman sneaks into a convent, rescues her involuntarily cloistered girlfriend, steals the corpse of a dead nun, and sets the abbey ablaze to cover their escape. No, this isn’t the opening scene of HBO Max’s latest ultraviolent hit; nor is it the plot of a book DeSantis’ minions have removed from school libraries. Rather, it’s merely one in a long list of unbelievable-buttrue episodes in the life of Julie d’Aubigny, the outrageous late 17th-century opera star known as “La Maupin.”

D’Aubigny’s larger-than-life story is largely forgotten today, despite being the subject of numerous novels and plays, but this weekend Rogue Stage (roguestage.com) aims to make some noise on her behalf with their concert reading of Queen of Swords. I recently spoke with Thom Mesrobian, co-writer of the new rock musical, about the long road to its debut on March 24 and 25 during Timucua’s 2023 WordPlay Festival (timucua.stellartickets.com) and his big hopes for its future.

Mesrobian is the producing director of Rogue Stage (“Polk County’s professional theater company”), and initially grabbed Orlando

Fringe audiences’ attention with button-pushing parodies like 2014’s FrankenChrist: The Musical and 2016’s Trump/Hamilton parody Simpleton. More recently, he created and starred in the 2022 Critics Choice Awardwinning Be a Pirate, which Mesrobian calls a “thinly veiled autobiography of my own life, where I had my dream of being a professional actor deferred until the age of 40.”

Sixteen years later, Mesrobian has worked for Disney and every other theme park, and is still employed as an entertainer at the Florida Aquarium — despite his actor father’s opposition to Mesrobian following in his footsteps.

“The feedback I had on Be a Pirate was humbling,” says Mesrobian. “I had one guy tell me that it didn’t just change the way he thought about storytelling, but the way he thought about being a father. … I think it just resonates with everybody — especially artists — who are always struggling with ‘what I want to be’

A similar tension drew Mesrobian to Julie d’Aubigny’s story, which he began developing into a musical in 2016 after stumbling upon a YouTube video recounting her more fantastical exploits. The cross-dressing prima donna of the Paris Opera was notorious for singing arias while dueling her conquests’ cuckolded husbands, and her arson-abetted escape (described above) instantly screamed “rock & roll” to Mesrobian. So he turned to his Simpleton collaborator, Ben Shepler (whom he first developed a relationship with while working at the now-defunct Holy Land Experience), who provided a song he’d written for his punk band in the early aughts. “It was just the sound that I wanted for the show. I heard it, I was like, ‘that’s it.’ I started writing lyrics to it. Three hours later, I had recorded them and send it back to him, and that was our first song.”

That initial burst of creativity was followed by “a ton of research on her life and what she experienced, trying to separate legend from fact, [and also] a lot of listening to my LGBT friends to understand what it would have been like to be a member of that community in the 1600s.” Initially intended as a fast Fringe followup to Simpleton, Mesrobian quickly found “that was just too restricting; I needed a cast of 20 [and] two and a half hours to tell all the stories. There’s no way to cut it down and do her justice.” In the end, he and Shepler have assembled 20 songs and “a good-sized book,” which they hope will come in under the threeplus hours of the first version they previewed five years ago.

While previous workshops of Queen of Swords were directed by Mark Hartfield, artistic director of Rogue Stage, this concert version is staged by acclaimed director Tara Kromer.

“I felt it was really important to get some diversity into the creative team, to get some different voices to speak and to interpret the story,” says Mesrobian, who only knew Kromer by reputation before approaching her to helm this project. “I’m all about collaboration; I realize my own limitations and what I can do, and that there’s lots of other people around me who are as good or better at things than I am.”

That sentiment extends to Mesrobian’s partnership with Shepler, whom he credits with taking the basic melodies he “bangs out” on keyboard (which he admits “all tend to sound like Journey or Gin Blossoms”) and “bring[ing] that pop-rock and punk-rock sensibility into the show.” He compares the genre collision of Versailles and rock opera to Hamilton’s mashup of the Founding Fathers with hip-hop, and envisions that in a fully staged production “the whole aesthetic of the show is going to be this blending of French style and everything from rock to ’80s New Wave.”

This Timucua concert is just the latest step in Queen of Swords’ saga, which also includes a six-song EP released online in 2021. Mesrobian hopes investors or producers will attend this weekend’s concerts and share his vision for where the show could someday go: “One day I saw the story of Hadestown, which started as a six-song folk music EP,” says Mesrobian. “They performed in a hollowed-out bus in Vermont, and then 10 years later it won the Tony Award. If people can do that with Hadestown, I think I can do that with this show. I believe that much in the story.” skubersky@orlandoweekly.com